I found this image circulating on several large conservative fan pages, so I wanted to take a minute to point out my issues with it.

First of all, the myth that Obama stole $716 Billion from Medicare to fund the Affordable Care Act has already been debunked.

Let’s pretend for a second that it was true though. Even without that baseless lie in the image this image is still a perfect depiction of the fact that conservatives don’t think their talking points through.

In this image “socialized healthcare” is meant to refer to a Government run healthcare program. The Affordable Care Act forces consumers to buy insurance from private companies, which is not Government run healthcare, so referring to it as “socialized healthcare” is erroneous.

Medicare is a Government run healthcare program. By conservatives’ definition Government run healthcare is “socialized healthcare,” therefore what this images actually says, to anyone who actually understand how our healthcare system is set up, “Obama is stealing 716 Billion for socialized healthcare to pay for privatized healthcare.” Which will never make sense to anyone with half a brain, no matter how many times you read it.

The underlying issue here is that conservatives have such an aversion to the facts that they’re completely willing to overlook them in an attempt to make a salient point. It doesn’t matter if their claims are baseless, as long as they get the chance to throw out the word “socialism” to scare people. There are things far worse than socialism, and one of them is uneducated people who reproduce and disseminate baseless memes in order to make a point based on a logical fallacy. And what’s worse than that is the people who believe these memes without challenging them.

The problem with conservatism is that there’s no basis in facts for their beliefs.